Six Williams College Faculty Awarded Tenure
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Williams College has announced the promotion of six assistant professors to the rank of associate professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2005.
They are Jon M. Bakija, economics; William M. Gentry, economics; Shinko Kagaya, Japanese; Peter D. Low, art; Marlene J. Sandstrom, psychology; and Kasumi Yamamoto, Japanese.
Jon M. Bakija
Bakija specializes in public finance, applied econometrics, and labor economics. At Williams since 1999, he teaches, among other courses, "Principles of Macroeconomics," "Public Finance," "Political Economy of Public Policy Issues," and a senior seminar in economics.
His research has appeared in numerous journals including American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, The National Tax Journal, Tax Notes, and the Social Security Bulletin. He is co-author with Joel Slemod of "Taxing Ourselves: A Citizen's Guide to the Debate over Taxes" (MIT Press), and with Eugene Steurele of "Retooling Social Security for the 21st Century" (The Urban Institute Press), which was selected as an "Outstanding Book of 1994" by Choice, the academic library journal. His current research projects include the impact of taxes on charitable giving behavior and migration.
Bakija is the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including the Model-Okun Early Career Fellowship in Economic Studies from the Brookings Institution, and grants from the Bradley Foundation and the American Association of Retired Persons for the study Social Security, 1992-93, and from the Williams Project on the Economics of Higher Education and the Williams College Henry George Fund.
Before coming to Williams, Bakija was a research associate at the Urban Institute, and worked as a visiting analyst for the Congressional Budget Office during a leave from Williams in 2003-04. This summer, he is serving as an economist on the staff of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. He received his bachelor of arts in government from Wesleyan University in 1990 and his doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2000.
William M. Gentry
Before coming to Williams in 2003, Gentry was associate professor of finance and economics at the Columbia Business School. He has also taught at Princeton and Duke universities, and was a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
At Williams, Gentry teaches advanced courses in price and allocation theory, tax policy, and corporate finance. His research focuses on public finance, economic effects of taxation, and corporate finance. He has also written about the effects of progressive taxation on job turnover, taxation and entrepreneurial entry and innovation, and entrepreneurship and household savings.
His work has been published in a number of economic journals, including the Journal of Finance, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy, Journal of Public Economics, The National Tax Journal, The Journal of Health Economics, The Journal of International Money and Finance, and Tax Policy and the Economy. Gentry's awards include National Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Lilly Endowment Teaching Fellowship, William G. Bowen Merit Fellow at Princeton University, and his doctoral dissertation received the National Tax Association Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation Award in 1991. He received a bachelor of science in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 and doctorate in economics from Princeton University in 1991.
Shinko Kagaya
Kagaya has been at Williams College since 1999, and teaches all levels of Japanese language, as well as Japanese literature and performance. Her research focuses on Japanese literature and performance, and in particular Noh theatre and its cross-cultural reception. She is a contributing author to Japanese Theatre and the International Stage, Realms of Translation: Culture, Colonies, and Identity, and has also published articles in periodicals such as Asian Theatre Journal, Theatre InSight, and Journal of the Noh Research Archives. She is also engaged in adaptation of Japanese-English plays. In addition to researching and writing about Noh theatre, she is an amateur practitioner, and frequently appears in public recitals in Japan.
Kagaya's grants and awards include the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Title VI East Asian Studies FLAS Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, and the 1997 Chaplin Memorial Award for recognition of superior accomplishment as a university instructor of Japanese language, among others.
Before coming to Williams, Kagaya taught at Hope College, was a visiting researcher at the Institutes of Comparative Culture, Beijing University and a research associate at the National Foreign Language Resource Center, Ohio State University. She has taught at several intensive language programs both in the U.S. and abroad.
She received her bachelor of arts from Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo in 1989 and her doctorate in East Asian languages and literatures from Ohio State University in 1999.
Peter D. Low
At Williams, Low teaches a range of courses, including "Introduction to Western Art History," "Early Medieval Art and Architecture," "Distant Encounters: Art, Pilgrimage and Crusade in the Middle Ages," and "Inventing Joan of Arc: The History of a Hero(ine) in Literature, Pictures, and Film."
He specializes in Romanesque art and architecture, monastic art, and art and pilgrimage and has published in Art Bulletin and Avista Forum Journal, among other publications. His fascination with medieval art "derives from that art's strangeness and beauty — the more I study medieval art, the more enthralled I become both by the central importance of this art to the world that produced it, as a means of making sense of that world — and by the power of this art to convey complicated ideas."
Low's grants and awards include a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship for study at Johns Hopkins University. Low received his bachelor of art from the University of Toronto and his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, and a postdoctoral Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies (LMS) from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Canada.
Marlene J. Sandstrom
Sandstrom teaches introductory through advanced psychology courses including, "Psychological Disorders," "Childhood Peer Relations and Clinical Issues," and "Clinical and Community Psychology." Her research focuses primarily on early peer relationships, peer rejection, the impact of disease on interpersonal relationships, and community-based intervention and prevention programs for troubled individuals.
She has published widely in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, and Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, among others. Before coming to Williams, Sandstrom was clinical fellow in psychology with a subspecialty in community mental health at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
She has also served as a clinical assistant for the Families and Schools Together Track Project, an intervention program for children at risk for behavioral and social difficulties.
Sandstrom did her postdoctoral work in pain management and anxiety disorders at the Duke University Medical Center in 1996-97. Her work included providing individual and group cognitive-behavioral treatments for anxiety disorders as well as evaluating and treating chronic pain patients. From 1997-99, she was director of the pain management program. At Williams, Sandstrom's research has focused on social vulnerability in childhood, with an eye toward understanding how children cope with difficult peer experiences such as teaching, ostracism, and victimization. In 2002-03, Williams College awarded her a fellowship for study at the Francis Christopher Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, where she continued her research in peer rejection with "From the Inside Out: How Children Cope with Peer Rejection."
She received her bachelor of art from Yale University in 1991 and her doctorate from Duke University in 1995.
Kasumi Yamamoto
Yamamoto has been an assistant professor of Japanese in the Asian Studies Department at Williams College since 1999. Her research interests include Japanese linguistics, first and second language acquisition and her specialty, numeral classifier systems in Asian languages.
Her first book, titled "The Acquisition of Numeral Classifiers: The Case of Japanese Children" has just been published by Mouton De Gruyter. Twice she was awarded grants for the revision of the Japanese on-line exercise project of the Vassar-Williams-Mellon Consortium for the Teaching of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She was a visiting scholar in the department of linguistics and philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002-03.
Before coming to Williams, Yamamoto taught Japanese in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT, Osaka University of Foreign Languages, and Columbia University. At Williams, Yamamoto teaches all levels of Japanese. She also has taught an introduction to Japanese language and culture course during Winter Study.
Yamamoto received a bachelor of art in English and American Literature from Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan in 1980 and her master's degree from Columbia University in 1985. In 2000 she received her doctorate in linguistics from Cornell University.
